Thinning Forest to Protect Yellowstone's Lake Village from Wildfire

Yellowstone staff have planned a multi-year fuel reduction project to create defensible space in and around the Lake Village area of Yellowstone National Park — protecting people, modern and historic buildings, infrastructure, and natural and cultural resources from wildfire. It follows similar successful mechanical fuel reduction elsewhere in the park since 2019.

The work

The $405,000 project is funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. It removes:

• large dead and downed wood;
• small trees that act as ladder fuels, carrying fire from the ground up into bigger trees.

Removing them raises the height of the canopy and greatly reduces the chance of crown fire — fire that spreads through the treetops.

Masticators, machines that chop vegetation into small pieces, do the mechanical work. Hand crews follow to fine-tune the treatment and repair the ground — removing or smoothing unnatural berms and other damage from the machines, and taking out additional trees. Crews also protect sensitive habitat, keep a variety of vegetation across the area, and favour whitebark pine wherever they can.

Why Lake Village

Lake Village has 257 structures, 136 of them historic. Fire management officer John Cataldo warned that, as things stood, much of the village might not be defensible if a large wildfire took hold between it and Elephant Back ridge: "The alternatives to substantial fuel reduction and forest stand modification in the wildland-urban interface are unacceptable. The unfortunate alternative is loss of modern and irreplaceable historic structures, which is not a viable option for Yellowstone National Park."

Earlier thinning in Yellowstone's Grant area, before (top) and after (bottom). NPS.

Measuring the result

Yellowstone's fire effects crew has monitored and recorded the area before treatment. Plots will measure downed woody fuel, canopy base height and canopy bulk density afterwards, to show whether the main goal — less potential for crown fire — is met.

The Park Service aggressively suppresses wildfires that threaten people, property, infrastructure or key natural and historic features, inside and outside parks. The project gives firefighters a safer place to work and a better chance of stopping an unwanted fire at Lake Village.

Help from Texas

In autumn 2022 Yellowstone partnered with Big Thicket National Preserve, which sent an experienced masticator operator to do some of the work and train Yellowstone staff to run the machine safely and efficiently. The team also helped finish similar fuel reduction at Old Faithful, begun during a wildfire in 2020. Infrastructure Law money also paid for a new GS-11 fuels specialist to carry on and expand the work.

Sources

• National Park Service, Yellowstone National Park, Multi-year defensible space project in Lake Village of Yellowstone protects from threat of wildfire.